I’m excited to share that all 9,000+ pages of transcripts of the Battle of Blair Mountain Treason Trials are now available for download from West Virginia University Libraries. Several years ago, I worked with my friend Tyler Cannon to scan each and every page–a huge effort made possible by funding from MacDowell / the Calderwood Fund for Project Grants to Journalism Fellows. We donated the scans to WVU, which has now made them publicly available in a blog post as downloadable PDFs. This is an incredible resource for those of us interested in American labor history in the Progressive Era, and until now it has been locked away on reels of microfilm in the library’s vaults, only available to those researchers with the time and resources to come to Morgantown and read them on a special machine. The accounts of events given in these pages by eyewitnesses and others have greatly informed the story I am telling in my forthcoming nonfiction history of the West Virginia Mine Wars, providing detail, texture, and humanity to an otherwise hidden history.
Our friend Fran Perkins of Jamaica Plain, MA sent this email.
On Sun, Jan 1, 2023 at 2:04 PM Fran Perkins wrote:
“Happy new year!
Every New Years Day there is a neighborhood walk in the arboretum. Today I was talking to some people I hadn’t met before and it turned out that they had just moved from Oakland. But she had also written an oral history about the Battle of Blair Mountain when she was in college and had lived in southern WV to do the research in the early 70’s. This is the book which was published a year ago from the manuscript she produced decades ago.”